What do you do when God places a calling on your life that you do not want to do? I think of Jonah. Nope, God, I’m good. I don’t want to. Well, eventually God wins this battle after wearing you down. The interesting thing is He has a way to make you excited about it, but He’s patient. He was that way with me, but He did not relent. The messages continued coming and the torrent broke the wall I built over time. So, today, with this post, I will begin to share some of the messages I believe God placed on my heart and why I think it is real.
The message I feel like God placed on my heart is the reason mankind is here and that is a better context to the interpretation of the Scriptures. This is the context of creation. Essentially, it is why did God create mankind, knowing ahead of time He would regret or grieve the creation (Genesis 6:6)?
This context gives us the opportunity to clean up and re-imagine how we see things in a reconstructive way.
As these blog posts build over time, my hope is to offer a different way to consider important concepts in a concise form. With that said, I will endeavor to limit all posts to 700 words or less. I will also offer these in a few different forms so they are easier to follow.
The format of the post types will be:
James 3:2 – These posts are challenges of one’s own prior belief and how that changed based on a new understanding.
Symbology – This idea of symbology is more broad than just symbols, it is how the sense of a word impacts meaning.
Science – Scripture and science intertwine in a meaningful way, but we miss it for a number of reasons. These posts will focus on what we might be able to find in the Bible and how that knowledge base may grow.
The Nature of Things – These posts are intended to give a deeper meaning to ideas and concepts we feel as though we understand well or not at all. The idea is to apply the deeper context to things for a more nuanced understanding.
Did You Notice? – This section is dedicated to strange things we can easily miss when we read our Bibles.
Presuppositions are also important. These are the basic ideas one comes to interpretation with. The idea is to recognize what baggage one has. So, consider this my baggage.
My presuppositions:
- Nobody has the full truth and the real truth is essentially meaningless, well, utterly meaningful. (Ecc 2:15, Ro 3:10-18, Is 6:9-11, Jer 8:8)
- We still don’t understand much of anything. (Mark 4:33-34, James 3:2, 1 Cor 1:17)
- The seas are not calm today, so there is no perfect person according to James 3:2.
- We have hermeneutics classes because things are not easy to understand.
- Mankind is proud and that pride is blinding us to this day.
- Every prior interpretation is done by a fallible man, so each interpretation is suspect.
- The easy reading of Scripture should prevail unless there is ample evidence to the contrary.
It is my hope this message finds a way to pull us together instead of pushing us apart with labels of differentiation. While this is the case, I do not expect anyone to simply trust me or believe me. Instead, believe the work I have done to prove my position. The connections between Scripture and science is so tightly interwoven it seems impossible to divorce these duel sources of truth. This, however, is up to you to determine, based on what I will offer in my ensuing posts.
These insights can only be seen if God opened one’s eyes to see them. Please share where, not that, I am wrong; I can’t wait for the opportunity to sharpen my saw.
God bless,
Mark
